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Accessibility

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is making sure everyone, including people with disabilities, have access
to the same information, services, and products.

Why is accessibility important?

Imagine you are taking an online course and part of an exam is to listen to a video
and answer questions afterwards. You can only view the video once and can’t retake
the exam. However, something is wrong with the audio and you can’t hear anything.
You start panicking because you don’t know what is going on in the video and you can’t
answer the questions. What do you do since this portion of the exam is a major percentage
of the test? This poor grade might cause you to drop the class. You’ve wasted your
time and money on a class you could have passed if you had the option of viewing the
video with closed captioning.

Our goal

As an educational institution, we firmly believe in equal opportunities for all, and
we are committed to making it as easy as possible for everyone in our community to
find the information they need on our website. To help visitors with disabilities,
our new site is designed to work better with many of the assistive tools used for
browsing websites. If we design with accessibility in mind, then we can improve the
experience for all users.

Our plan

We strive to achieve the recommendations of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We reference these guidelines to
create web pages that successfully meet these requirements by using these techniques. This is an ongoing process and it is possible that some users may encounter problems
accessing some pages or documents. If you find a page that isn’t accessible, please
email web.communications@tccd.edu.

To test our design and markup for compliancy we used several tools and screen readers
including the following: WebAIM Wave, NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, Talk Back, Chrome Accessibility Tools, Siteimprove and OmniUpdate
tools.

Tips and best practices

When creating documents, it is important to remember that people who are visually
impaired or have limited vision will be using screen readers. The screen readers need
to be able to identify all parts of your documents including text, graphics, images
and tables. Here is a list of guidelines that will help screen readers identify the
components of your document. Run the accessibility checker when using Microsoft Office products.

Emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs

Text

Use a normal font such as Times or Arial; nothing fancy.

Use 10 point and above.

Use black and white; there is no reason to use colored text.

Stay away from using background colors. Someone with low visibility might have trouble
reading the text if there isn’t enough contrast.

Images

When creating email messages, your text/message should not be an image. If you can’t grab the text in the email by highlighting and copying it
to paste somewhere else, then it is not accessible.

Images need accompanying descriptive text before the image.

Make sure the image is not central to the message. If you were to take out the image
or photo, would the message still make sense to someone who is blind?

If you are not sure that your email is accessible, attach a text document.

Do not use image links.

Inserting links or video

When inserting links, use a descriptive text, instead of the long URL. The screen
reader will be reading and telling the user where they might choose to navigate to,
rather than a long line of jargon they may not understand.